The B-i-b-l-e

As a kid, cer­tain books (Jane Eyre, A Lit­tle Princess, Lit­tle Women, Girl of the Lim­ber­lost, The BFG, The Oz series, etc.) appeared and swal­lowed me whole, whales to my Jonah. I sat in the ribs’ cor­ri­dor with­out a match, lis­ten­ing to blood course through the fish. But The Good Book was some­thing else.

I was raised on the B-i-b-l-e and, when spit up by the whale, I hap­pily wan­dered its blis­ter­ing shores. With my fam­ily, in church study groups, or alone in my room, I rarely approached another book with the same eager, med­i­ta­tive diligence.

The Bible was always pre-parsed, each word a geode wait­ing to be cracked. We read verse by num­bered verse, absurdly audit­ing every phrase. This was my edu­ca­tion in seman­tics, and how I came to love the study of signs and mean­ing. I can’t help but won­der how this early, intense study has shaped the way I read and inter­pret, well…everything else.

I’m grate­ful for my time spent por­ing over scrip­ture. Despite my church’s fun­da­men­tal­ist lean­ings, I was allowed to spec­u­late. When we gath­ered in a cir­cle and dis­cussed how Deuteron­omy might apply to daily life, it was with the awed con­vic­tion that the Bible was a liv­ing, breath­ing thing; as much about our voices as its printed word. And we took it slow because, after all, it would be with us the rest of our lives.

I’m not sure when I last read the Bible. It’s weird what’s lodged in my mind, and all that’s passed through the sieve. This is the longest pas­sage I can remem­ber off the top of my head:

…in view of God’s mercy, offer your bod­ies as liv­ing sac­ri­fices, holy and pleas­ing to God, for this is your spir­i­tual act of wor­ship. Do not con­form any longer to the pat­tern of this world, but be trans­formed by the renew­ing of your mind. Then you can test and [some­thing some­thing] what God’s will is—his good, pleas­ing and per­fect will.

This was my favorite verse for years, which I had to look up just now:

I am still con­fi­dent of this:
I will see the good­ness of the LORD
in the land of the liv­ing.
Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD.

What must it all sound like to other peo­ple?! Strangely, only through regard­ing the Bible as fact, or truth, can one truly inter­act with it as a poem (I think). Susan Stew­art sug­gests that we receive poems the way we receive promises,

…in the sense not of some­thing scripted or repeat­able but of some­thing that “hap­pens,” that “occurs” as an event and can be con­tin­u­ally called on, called to mind, in the unfold­ing present.

Isn’t that how we saw the Word, as one giant promise? Yet the one receiv­ing doesn’t always feel sat­is­fied. A “believer,” lay­ing her whole self before the text, may sense the imbal­ance Stew­art acknowl­edges in poetry; that “what goes out over­whelms what comes back.” For me, scrip­ture was like so much fruit sur­round­ing the stone. But what hap­pens when the stone dissolves?

I don’t miss read­ing the Bible; this isn’t about that. Basi­cally, I’ve been try­ing to under­stand my pref­er­ence for the phrase or caesura over chap­ter or prose. Recently I thought, Maybe it’s because I was taught to value the verse so much. As in, the Bible’s arbi­trary meter. Oversimplification?

Of course, the psalms and epis­tles did more to me than that. When I say the Bible taught me to read, I mean it taught me to trust fic­tions. Implic­itly. It taught me to make story my most inti­mate author­ity. And, like a poem, it’s short­com­ings shaped me, too. To para­phrase some­thing else Stew­art said, we begin to cre­ate when we feel estranged. Each bib­li­cal fail­ure to answer my pre-and-post-adolescent ques­tions allowed me to do some meaning-making of my own.